Very cool. My mistake for overlooking that. Victoria metrics seems more like a metrics store? Something comparable to influx? Is that right?

Correct! It is a TimeSeries database for storing metrics. It is open source, including clustered version, and contains many additional tools for alerting, collecting and visualizing metrics. There are many in VictoriaMetrics community who switched from Influx to VictoriaMetrics due to performance reasons. See also the following doc comparing differences between these two here https://docs.victoriametrics.com/guides/migrate-from-influx....

Disclaimer: I'm one of the VictoriaMetrics maintainers.